There is a sentence near the end of Joel Crosby’s interview with John Collins of William Branham Historical Research that explains more than he knew when he said it: “Every minute I spend here knowing that one day I will probably leave … is a minute wasted.”
He was then in the final stage of leaving. The years before that were hectic: a maze of fear, loyalty, family pressure, theology, social dependency, spiritual language, and the old instinct to defend the only world that ever felt like home.
In the interview, Crosby talks through his life inside The Door in the Netherlands, part of the wider Potter’s House / Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM) network that also uses names such as Victory Chapel and Lighthouse. He also discusses why he eventually began writing, researching, and speaking publicly about the movement. The conversation is personal, but it is not merely personal. The point of telling the story is to show the system that made the story possible.
A story that begins before he was born
The story begins with his father, Dennis Crosby, long before Joel was born. Dennis entered The Fellowship in the United States through Victory Chapel while serving in the army. As the army moved him from place to place, he encountered different Fellowship churches. Eventually he came to Europe, met Joel’s mother in the first Fellowship church in the Netherlands, and later made a choice that shaped Joel’s childhood: he turned down a stable civilian job connected to the army because he wanted his children to experience the “ongoing revival” he believed he had found in The Fellowship.
Nobody joins a cult because they think they are joining a cult. People enter because they believe they have found life, seriousness, mission, holiness, purpose, or a version of Christianity more intense than the one they knew before. Dennis Crosby was not trying to place his children inside a system that would later damage them. He thought he was giving them the best spiritual inheritance available.
That is one reason the subject requires care. High-control religion is not sustained only by villains. It is often sustained by sincere people who have been trained to mistake pressure for discipleship, isolation for holiness, and obedience to leaders for obedience to God.
Growing up different, and learning to fear normal life
As a child, Joel did the ordinary things church children did in that world: Sunday school, children’s choir, children’s church, youth events, drama teams, and later outreach. From inside the system, this felt normal because it was the only normal he had.
The difference became obvious outside the church. He describes in the interview how older church kids often testified that high school became dangerous because they wanted to fit in, started smoking or drinking, and “backslid.” As a teenager, he drew the obvious conclusion: fitting in could cost him his salvation. So he tried not to fit in.
The result was not holiness. It was loneliness. He was bullied, moved through several schools, and learned to treat ordinary social life as spiritually suspicious. That is one of the quieter injuries of high-control religion. The outside world is not only described as sinful. It is made emotionally unusable. The member is taught to fear the very world they would need if they ever left.
When pastoral counsel replaces qualified care
The interview also covers one of the most serious issues in churches like this: mental health. When he became depressed as a teenager, he did what he had been taught to do. He went to his pastor.
The pastor was not trained to handle depression, suicidal thoughts, family stress, or the medical complexity of what was happening in the Crosby home. That did not prevent him from speaking with authority. His advice, as Crosby recounts it in the interview, was that if he was depressed he should smile, because smiling would make his brain produce chemicals that would make him happy. Then the pastor told him his father was a rebel and that he needed to find another father figure in the church.
Nothing here is clinical advice. The point is what happens when untrained religious authority is allowed to occupy the place of qualified care.
A pastor can pray. A pastor can listen. A pastor can support a person while they seek professional help. What a pastor must not do is replace care with control, then call the result spiritual leadership. When a member’s mental distress is routed through a leader whose first priority is loyalty to the group, the member is no longer being cared for as a person. He is being managed as a potential threat.
The family unit becomes negotiable
One of the most painful parts of the interview is the effect this had on Joel’s relationship with his father. Dennis was ill. He was in pain. Joel spent much of his youth expecting him to die. At the same time, because his father had become known as a “rebel” in the church, he learned to resent him and distance himself from him.
That is how spiritual control often works. It rarely needs to say, “Stop loving your family.” It teaches you a hierarchy of loyalty in which family becomes safe only when family submits to the group. A father who questions the pastor becomes spiritually suspect. A relative who leaves becomes dangerous. A friend outside the church becomes worldly. The system does not need to destroy the family loudly. It can do so by redefining love as agreement and concern as rebellion.
In his case, this cost years of closeness with his father. Those years cannot be recovered. That is one of the reasons to reject the sentimental defense that controlling churches are merely “strict.” Strictness is about standards. Control is about ownership.
Marriage under pastoral permission
The interview then moves into his relationship with the woman who is now his wife. The rules were not written as bluntly as outsiders might expect, but they were clear enough in practice. Dating required permission. Marriage required permission. Even the date of the wedding was not theirs to decide freely.
He describes how private things he had confessed were repeated to people close to his future wife, and how his pastor later tried to stop the marriage after he began asking harder questions about the church. The pastor warned her that marrying him would lead to misery and that he would pull her out of the church. She cried. He was used to being spoken to that way. That should disturb anyone who understands what pastoral care is supposed to be.
Marriage is one of the clearest tests of a church’s view of authority. A healthy church may give counsel. It may ask wise questions. It may warn against obvious harm. A controlling church treats marriage as a loyalty checkpoint. The couple is not guided into maturity. They are measured for usefulness and compliance.
The abuse allegations that changed the question
He also speaks in the interview about the allegations involving the former pastor in Zwolle and the way those allegations were handled around him. Those stories are not reduced to a few dramatic paragraphs here. They concern real people, real trauma, and details that deserve to be heard with care in the full conversation.
What matters for this article is the structural point. His confidence in the church did not collapse because he wanted to leave. It collapsed because he saw the gap between what the church claimed to be and what it was willing to protect. When a church can remove a leader formally and still preserve the culture that enabled him, it has not solved the problem. It has changed the visible figure while leaving the machinery intact.
That was the stage at which doctrine mattered more. He had to ask whether the problem was one bad pastor or whether the system itself had doctrines and habits that made abuse, secrecy, pressure, and manipulation easier to excuse.
Why doctrine became the turning point
For years, he defended The Fellowship because he believed it preached the Bible. When his family called it a cult, he pushed back. He challenged them to prove it from Scripture. They gave him pages of arguments, and he studied them because he thought he would be able to refute them.
He could not.
That was the turning point. The issue was not whether the church used Bible verses. Every abusive religious system with Christian language uses Bible verses. The question was whether those verses were being read in context and whether the structure built from them looked like the New Testament.
In the interview, he mentions tithing and headship because those were the subjects his pastor immediately raised when he came to him with deeper concerns. That response clarified the real center of the system. The question was not first whether abuse had been handled rightly, whether conscience had been respected, or whether Scripture had been taught in context. The question was whether he still accepted the doctrines that kept people obedient.
The wider research trail
The final part of the interview turns toward research: Prescott, Arizona, Foursquare history, Chuck Smith, William Branham, Wayman Mitchell, Pentecostal networks, and the way destructive systems can inherit language and authority models from earlier movements.
That part of the conversation should be handled carefully. A long-form interview can raise research trails that still require documentation before they become firm historical conclusions. The responsible point is narrower and stronger: high-control religious systems rarely appear out of nowhere. They borrow structures, phrases, myths of spiritual succession, revival stories, and leadership models from the religious worlds that produced them.
One of the ideas discussed is the “transference of spirit” logic that appears in parts of The Fellowship’s leadership culture. When a movement teaches people to look for a spiritual mantle moving from one leader to another, the character and accountability of the leader can become secondary to the mythology of succession. That is dangerous. It can make people accept a man because he appears to stand in the right line, not because he is biblically qualified, transparent, humble, or safe.
That is where personal testimony and historical research meet. Survivors describe what the system did to them. Researchers ask where the system learned to do it.
The advice he gave at the end
At the end of the interview, John asks what he would say to someone still inside. His answer was the sentence this article began with: every minute spent somewhere you already know you may need to leave is a minute wasted.
That advice is not a command to make a reckless decision. Leaving a high-control church can affect family, housing, friendships, marriage, work, and mental health. People need support, planning, and in many cases qualified professional help. The point is that fear should not be mistaken for wisdom forever.
If the only reason you stay is that you are afraid of what will happen when you leave, then you have already learned something important about the place you are in.
Why the story keeps being told
The story matters because isolated experiences are easy to dismiss. One former member can be called bitter. One family can be called rebellious. One testimony can be framed as a misunderstanding. Ten stories from different countries become harder to ignore. Hundreds of comments from former members become harder still. Documents, sermons, contracts, internal books, public interviews, and repeated patterns across continents make the usual defense less credible.
This is why Crosby continues to document The Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, Lighthouse, and Christian Fellowship Ministries. The question is not whether the movement has sincere members. It does. The question is whether sincerity can sanctify a system that uses fear, hierarchy, and spiritual language to control people.
It cannot.
Watch the interview for the full story, including the parts that are too personal and too complicated to compress neatly into an article. Then ask the only question that really matters in this subject: does the evidence show ordinary Christian discipleship, or does it show spiritual control?
